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3/13/13

Nurturing the Soul of Your Family: 10 Ways to Reconnect and Find Peace in Everyday Life

Nurturing the Soul of Your Family: 10 Ways to Reconnect and Find Peace in Everyday Life is a new book by Renee Trudeau filled with wonderful suggestions and insights to help you find peace and harmony within your family. In the middle of our overscheduled, overworked lives we somehow need to find a way to make our family the source of our joyfulness. Renee shares her ten paths to peace with readers, showing us that a challenging family life is the norm but it doesn't have to be something we're resigned to. Rather she shows us examples from her own life where she and her family learned to slow down and live more intentionally. There are exercises in the book to help us create stronger family bonds and connections while finding a balance in life. I read this book with a highlighter in hand and made tons of notes in the margins. It's a fabulous book and a must-read for anyone with a family!

Disclosure: I received this book at no charge in exchange for my honest review.

Relationships
of all types can be challenging. In particular, family members, partners, and
children often develop a sixth sense for how to push our buttons. For myself,
to become less reactive, I’ve had to slowly become more self-aware,
compassionate, loving toward myself, and attuned to my needs — which has made
me a much more emotionally present parent and partner.

Some of the keys are
to show up in our relationships with a soft and open heart, a healthy
perspective, and a full cup rather than a half-empty one. Before we can do
that, however, we have to examine ourselves: we have to release and heal old
self-limiting beliefs by understanding what we’re holding on to and why.

We all have emotional
baggage. Ever heard the phrase “the issues are in the tissues”? Our beliefs,
scars, and old patterns from our family lineage, childhood, culture, education,
and birth order all significantly affect our worldview and habitual ways of
being. These, in turn, guide how we show up and relate to our family members.

Some days we get
easily triggered. Maybe our child not putting their dirty clothes in the
laundry room sends us over the edge, while other days they could break the front
door and we’d just roll with it. Our state of being has the most impact on how
we respond to external circumstances. Some days we receive the gift of
observing when we’re stuck in an old pattern or way of seeing things, and other
times we just feel stuck, or else constantly critical or judgmental, thinking
of our partner or children: “If they’d just listen to me, we’d all be happier!”

When this happens,
look inward to see if you have any unclaimed baggage. For instance, when my
son, Jonah, was about to turn ten, he and I went through a really difficult
patch. He’s a beautiful, passionate, mature, intense kid, and as he reached
adolescence, his level of defiance at times overwhelmed me. A simple request to
finish homework or put his dirty dishes in the sink could invoke an emotional
tsunami. Since I have a tendency to be controlling, our interactions were a
Molotov cocktail.

After a particularly
hard stretch involving lots of crying jags (mostly mine), I called Terri, a
parent educator, and asked if my husband and I could see her for a session. I was exhausted from the stressful
interchanges and needed help. After I explained our situation, Terri turned to
me and gently shared, “You are going through mourning — Jonah is no longer a
child. He’s an adolescent.” Terri went on to highlight some of the
science around early-adolescent behavior
and how best to support my son; in short, offer love and acceptance, not
solutions and tips for improvement. After that illuminating session, things got
much easier in our home — not yellow-brick-road happy, but the crying and
yelling diminished greatly.

In part, the
improvement occurred because my husband and I tweaked our language and gave
Jonah more freedom, but mostly things changed because my husband and I shifted
ourselves internally. We realized we were holding unrealistic, supersized fears
that were causing us to be overly critical; our heads had become filled with
visions of our out-of-control nine-year-old turning into a sixteen-year-old
heroin addict. We were “parenting from the future” and from our own fears and
wounds, rather than from the present moment, which was what our son most
needed. This aha moment and shift in our awareness are what created the big
shift in our family dynamic that we needed. Often we have to break down in
order to break through.

# # #

Life balance coach/speaker Renée Peterson
Trudeau is the author of the new book Nurturing the Soul of Your Family.
Thousands of women in ten countries are participating in Personal Renewal
Groups based on her first book, the award-winning The Mother’s Guide to
Self-Renewal. Visit her online at www.ReneeTrudeau.com